Presentation: How to solve brickwalls in the 1800s, with Mike Gould, 20th February

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Join us for the February Family Tree Brickwalls, Skills & Solutions Club webinar, at which Mike Gould will be tutoring us in ‘How to solve brickwalls in the 1800s’, part of the ‘Family History Brickwall Tips & Tactics’

The three webinars, each tutored by Mike Gould, in the ‘Family History Brickwall Tips & Tactics’ series, are aimed at helping family history researchers to break down brickwalls.

What will you learn at the brickwalls sessions?

Mike Gould's 3 webinars will focus on extending the family tree and ensuring that it is correct.
In addition to providing strategies, hints and tips, the series illustrates the wide range of source record types that can help with these problems.
The series is being presented on the Brickwalls, Skills & Solutions Club at the dates and times below:
               Webinar 1 (20th February, 1-2pm): “How to solve brickwalls in the 1800s”
               Webinar 2 (13th March, 1-2pm): “How to solve brickwalls before 1800”
               Webinar 3 (24th April, 1-2pm): “How to solve brickwalls after 1900”

How can I join the Brickwalls, Skills & Solutions Club webinar
This webinar will take place on Zoom on Thursday 20th February, 1-2pm UK time with Mike Gould.
This webinar presentation is part of the Brickwalls, Skills & Solutions Club programme brought to you by Family Tree Plus.
The online learning session will last one hour: with a 30-40 minute presentation, followed by time for questions.
 

How to join the session
This presentation is part of the Brickwalls, Skills & Solution Club programme brought to you by Family Tree Plus.

Get your ticket for £10, or join Family Tree Plus for just £5, come along to this webinar and attend four webinars every month! Already a Family Tree Plus member? Log in now to get your link.


If you have any queries about the presentation or about Family Tree Plus, please email [email protected]

About the speaker
Mike Gould has been involved in family history research for over twenty years.  He has contributed articles to Family Tree Magazine and other publications and eventually decided to write a book on how to research family history.  He drew on his experience of systems engineering management in his “day job” to design a new type of book that would be whatever the reader needed at any one time: a family history reference book, an instruction manual, an encyclopaedia, a history book or an explanation of the legal context of Acts of Parliament relevant to our ancestors.  Above all, it needed to be “a good read”. It is available from Amazon in paperback £35: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Family-History-Manual-Strategies-researching/dp/B0D5HLZNRF.

Please find the review of Mike Gould's book by Helen Tovey below.

A Family History Manual: a review

A Family History Manual, subtitled ‘Strategies, techniques and sources for researching UK family history’, by Mike Gould, spans more than 500 pages of family history guidance and information, covering: genealogical research techniques, and information about sources, records and evidence. This makes for a very comprehensive guide. Useful to dip in to, refer to, or just to read.

Family historian, Mike Gould’s goal in writing the book was for it to meet many of the needs of the family researcher – from that of instruction manual to reference book, encyclopedia to history book.

A family history how-to instruction book and encyclopedia combined

As Mike explains: ‘This book can be what you need it to be:

  • ‘A “how to” instruction manual on one day, a reference book to explain a particular type of record or another.
  • ‘Or an encyclopedia to look up facts.
  • ‘Or a history book to outline what was happening during the lifetime of an ancestor.
  • ‘Or a legal framework to describe how the law gave rise to records that we can investigate.’

The book is organised in four parts:

  • introduction;
  • research techniques;
  • sources, records and evidence;
  • and finally a concluding part on ‘pulling it all together’.

Who is the manual aimed at? Beginner, next steps or more advanced?

The book is aimed family history researchers of all levels, from those just thinking of dipping their toes into the water (with coverage of topics such as organising the information you find, understanding the records you are using, and not relying on the work of others without checking it); to those with many years of experience and who are wishing to dig deeper into further record collections (such as manorial and estate records, apprenticeship, military or taxation records).

Even family history researchers with many years of experience will stumble on new ideas and avenues to learn more about genealogy. Have you heard of the Genealogy Word Finder, for instance? It’s an online tool, recommended in the manual by Mike Gould, that is useful for transcribing hard-to-decipher words.

At the start of the book Mike Gould acknowledges his thanks to Caroline Wetton, her family history group, and the many online groups that have provided Mike with help and insights over the years. The book is, in part, a distillation of these many tips and useful insights that he has carefully gathered, tried and tested, and knows to work.

Within the pages is plenty of good common sense, learned by the author in the course of many years doing family history. For instance, when considering effective ways to search for a person, remember this recommendation by Mike Gould:

‘If you believe that someone could have been born in one of two places that are widely separated, search using each place in turn, rather than using a wide search that would return results from lots of other places.’

A wealth of information, which is easy to find your way around

The book contains a wealth of detailed family history information, but author Mike Gould has used tables, lists, colour-coded tags and flowcharts to help you both find what you need and understand what you’re reading about.

His goal is to enable comprehension of a topic and he understands that ‘Some of you will prefer to read the textual explanation of the strategy and others will like the flowchart approach – that’s why I use both!’.

The ‘contents overview’ pages make it easy to navigate to the chapter you need – see the contents at-a-glance across two pages.

The ‘detailed contents’ pages, meanwhile, provide details of sub-topics to help you fine-tune the topic that you need to read about.

In addition the 14-page index at the back of the manual allows you to drill down with even more precision.

The index entries for marriage, included here below, will give you an idea of the useful quality of the index – and thus of the Manual too:

  • Marriages
  • Absence of, for couples
  • Age of Marriage Act (1929)
  • Age of Marriage Act (Northern Ireland) (1951)
  • Allowed place of
  • Anglican Church Canons (1604)
  • Banns, by
  • Bigamous
  • Bonds
  • Clandestine
  • Common-law
  • Cromwellian
  • Deceased Brother’s Widow’s Marriage Act (1921)
  • Divorce Reform Act (1969)
  • Finding the church
  • Legitimacy Act (1926)
  • Licence, by
  • Lord Hardwicke’s Act (1753)
  • Marriage Act (1823)
  • Marriage Act (1835)
  • Marriage Duty Act (1695)
  • Marriage law
  • Marriage registers
  • Matrimonial Causes Act (1857)
  • Matrimonial Causes Act (1923)
  • Matrimonial Causes Act (1937)
  • Multiple
  • Nonconformist
  • Nullity of Marriage Act (1971)
  • Place of
  • Prohibited degrees
  • Prohibited, of lunatics
  • Register Office, in
  • Registration
  • Validity of
  • witnesses

How to buy A Family History Manual by Mike Gould

The book is available from Amazon, paperback, published 2024, priced (Amazon.co.uk) £35. (Note the publication is not available via Australian Amazon).

Remember to sign up for Mike Gould's 3 webinars to help you learn tactics and tips to smash your brickwalls over the past few centuries. Click here for details of how to sign up.